When at sea, ships may be damaged as a result of various reasons, including collision with another vessel, grounding, or even weapon strike. Laser metrology equipment is a very important means for obtaining data related to the damage to facilitate damage control. There are no known mounts for accommodating the mounting of laser metrology equipment over the side of a waterborne ship to capture accurate data for damage control incidents. For an afloat ship, because of the lack of a versatile mounting arrangement, it is not possible to set up data-capturing equipment pier-side or on an adjacent ship, and properly obtain valid and accurate data from a target ship. Thus, it is desired to have a mounting apparatus that has the capability of holding the laser metrology equipment and also the flexibly to position the laser metrology equipment to facilitate data collection when the hull is damaged.